Freelance to Freedom

The Roadmap for Creating a Side Business to Achieve Financial, Time and Life Freedom

Vincent Pugliese

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781683504573
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Finance

Vincent and his wife were stuck in dead end newspaper photography jobs, in debt, stressed, with a baby on the way while making $15 an hour. After winning the highest award in his field, Vincent was offered a 3 percent raise. He knew at that moment he needed a monumental change. One month away from their baby being born, Vincent and Elizabeth started a side photography business out of desperation. In less than four years, they grew their business to pay off all of their debt, including their home, and left their jobs for a life of freedom. With the world moving rapidly towards a freelance model, Freelance to Freedom is not only timely and necessary, but it's also entertaining, engaging and paints a picture for anyone looking for a life of freedom with money, time and location.

PART I

FOUR YEARS TO FREEDOM

Becoming Normal

We settled in nicely in Evansville. It’s a challenging adjustment for a New Yorker to adapt to the Midwestern lifestyle, but it was working. The job was good, although I was never comfortable as an employee. My assignments consisted of spot news, various news stories, features, local sports and portraits. I missed shooting professional sports, so on my own time, I would obtain credentials through the newspaper and travel to St. Louis, Nashville, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis to shoot the Rams, Cardinals, Colts, Titans, Bengals, and Reds games to get my fix.

A year later, Elizabeth and I were engaged. Our salaries combined were just above $60,000, so we needed to be cautious about how our wedding would affect our money situation. Aside from the credit cards we used, and $12,000 in student loans, we didn’t have much debt, and we didn’t want to go in deeper for the wedding.

Sitting at the kitchen table to crunch the numbers, we devised a plan. The wedding was a year away. If we could each save $400 a week from our checks, we would be able to pay for the entire thing in cash. Diligent and focused, we nailed the wedding budget like a finely tuned machine.

As the big day approached, our apartment lease was ending and we wanted out. Neither of us had any desire to start our married life together living above the crazy couple who fought every night and the angry lady living to our right. It was time to go house shopping.

Clueless about how to purchase a house, we drove around the east side of Evansville every evening to see what was out there. New Yorkers are raised listening to stories about how expensive houses are. I was excited to see that homes in this Midwestern town were a fraction of what my friends were paying back home.

We found a cute house with ugly brown and green paint and fell in love with it. It was “For Sale by Owner”, so we cautiously knocked on the front door. Kirk and Christy, the young parents of two boys, invited us in and gave us the tour. Elizabeth and I were hooked immediately. Our negotiating skills were void as we managed to only drop the price by $1,000, but at least we got them to add in the refrigerator. (You don’t want us handling your next contract negotiation.) The final price was $126,900, and just like that, we were in!

Debt People

The week our bid was accepted, my black Chevy Beretta was struggling through its final days. I only had a car payment once before, and I hated it. But with all our money tied up in the wedding and the down payment for the house, I loosened up a bit and bought an $11,000 Saturn a few weeks before our wedding. Mortgage? Check. Car payment? Check. Student loans? Check. We were on our way to being normal, and normal is not a good thing.

Elizabeth and I returned from our sun-drenched honeymoon in Saint Lucia to our new life, our new house, and my new car. I sat in my metallic-blue car on my way to work and instead of enjoying the new(er) car smell, I felt uneasy that we now owed a bunch of money. But that’s normal, right?

Everyone tells you debt is normal. I realized I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have debt. My grandfather used to say that you can count on two things in life: death and taxes. I guess it’s actually three things: death, taxes, and debt.

My uneasiness went away quickly, because when you have a new house, you need stuff to go in it. We brought our old futon and creaky bed with us. We made do with the junky kitchen table from our apartment. But we also financed our couch set for our living room.

Debt is like tattoos: once you have one, it’s really easy to add more. That’s why I was never comfortable getting that first tattoo. Next thing I know, I’d be washing my face in the morning to see it covered with ink like Mike Tyson.

Looking Good and Feeling Bad

The debt made us look good, though! Our house was coming together nicely. The sun flowed in magnificently through the double doors in our living room, brightening up the entire floor. We painted and mowed the lawn like any good citizen. We even got the dog! Lola, our fluffy, cuddly Golden Retriever, was the first addition to our family eight months after our wedding.

The first big purchase we made on credit was the big screen television I talked Elizabeth into. This was all me. She didn’t watch it often, but I convinced her that we needed a high-definition, 50-inch television dominating our family room. In 2003, it was a showstopper. It was also expensive. We took out a store credit card for the entire balance of $2,500. It was one of those no-interest cards—as long as the balance was paid by a certain date.

The debt slowly tightened its grip on us. Between a mortgage, car payment, television, student loan, and furniture, we were no longer as comfortable as we were before the wedding. It obviously wasn’t affecting me much because that’s when I decided we needed a complete overhaul of our damp basement.

I talked Elizabeth into the major project. I would bust down the existing walls, rip out the cruddy steps, and replace them both with beautiful new ones. I would put in a ceramic tile floor throughout, complete with a radiant heat system underneath the tiles. On the right side of the room would be a pool table with hanging blue lights. On the left would be a custom-built bar we would create ourselves.

And we would pay for it all with plastic.

Dave Who?

From the moment I put the hammer through drywall, we were neck deep in a huge project. Day after day, hour after hour, all my time away from work was spent remodeling the basement. Never mind that up until this point, the extent of my “handiness” was limited to painting our kitchen.

When I wasn’t in the basement, I was at work. That summer, I was marked down for a number of photo assignments in Southern Illinois, a rural area the newspaper was making a push into to grow readership. I drew the short straw to cover the quiet little towns dotting the lower part of the state. The drives, which could vary between an hour and two hours, challenged my sanity. Once the Evansville radio stations were out of range, I had access to the wide variety of three different country music stations. This was pre-smartphone, and the CD player in my car didn’t work.

It was on one of these humdrum drives when I heard the twangy voice of some hillbilly-sounding man taking calls about money. I initially took him as some local radio guy for whom I’d just doubled his audience by tuning in. But the next caller was from San Antonio, Texas. A few minutes later, someone from Denver, Colorado, called in. As I cruised through the backroads of towns like Carmi and Eldorado, I found myself trying hard to hang onto his words as the radio reception got worse. His voice faded away into the dusty roads. This was information I needed to hear. I didn’t even get your name, I thought, like some jilted dude at a bar as that girl walked away.

Two days later, I was sent to photograph the practice of the Harrisburg football team. Scanning through my limited options again, this guy’s voice jumped out of my speakers. He was railing on some guy about his car payment. I nodded righteously in agreement. Who takes out a car payment like that? I thought while driving in my car that had a payment on it. He tackled all sorts of money issues. He even related them to how money affects relationships. It was all so freaking interesting. And I wondered to myself, Have I become this lame? Instead of listening to music or sports talk, I’m listening to a money show and loving it. But I still didn’t know who this guy was.

Finally, before throwing to break, he declared, “You are listening to The Dave Ramsey Show.”

Hmmmm, never heard of him. I drove back to the newspaper to see if anyone had heard of this guy. Was he from around here? Nothing. Nobody knew who he was. I was as curious as I was confused. This stuff was too good to be hidden on some backwoods radio station. I searched the local stations to see if he was on anywhere in Evansville, but he wasn’t.

The very next day, instead of dreading the Illinois assignment, I volunteered for it. I apparently needed my daily fix.

For a few months, I looked forward to any opportunity to listen to his show. I would take notes at the end of my drive about his methods. He practiced a thing called “baby steps,” which was a seven-step formula for getting out of debt and becoming financially free. So, as I continued to pile up debt daily with the black hole basement renovation, I nodded arrogantly in agreement as Dave educated debt-ridden callers on their financial mistakes.

Heading Toward the Cellar

By September, the cashiers at Home Depot knew me by name. I made a purchase there at least once a day for the past month. With a goal of having the basement completed for our big New Year’s Eve party, I justified the spending as a temporary thing. I justified the debt as normal—like almost all the callers told Ramsey before he tried to set them straight.

Thousands of dollars of new debt later, we were entering the home stretch. December arrived, and we were weeks away from our self-imposed deadline. The radiant heat was now flowing through the floors of our basement, warming the room from the bottom with a simple twist of the thermostat. The tile was installed and grouted. The walls were up and painted. The pool table was ordered and on its way.

The final piece of the puzzle was the bar. We had designed it in an L shape, and the thick polyurethane top had settled and begun drying. Elizabeth took on the project of doing a mosaic tile design that would encompass the entire lower level of the bar. We were tired, but pushed on. Our credit card was just as exhausted from all the swipes it took at the home-improvement stores and our holiday shopping. It was then, in mid-December, that Elizabeth and I took a vacation to Colorado. It was a relaxing few days at a ski resort that I remember as much for the newspaper headline of the capture of Saddam Hussein as the beautiful Rocky Mountains.

At the Denver airport, I strolled into a bookstore where I came upon The Total Money Makeover, Dave Ramsey’s book that I heard him plug on-air. I had slipped from listening to the show when my assignments in Illinois dwindled. I had lost my “gazelle intensity,” as Dave would say. As Elizabeth waited by our gate, I plucked down my credit card to purchase a book about getting out of debt. Irony personified.

I had heard the man, but I had failed to listen. I spent months agreeing with his money advice while we dug ourselves deeper into debt. It was to the point that I didn’t even want to look at our statements. We were heading down an unsustainable path, and the tension from it was affecting my sleep. On the flight home, Elizabeth slept on my shoulder as I studied the book like I was preparing for a final exam. It was an easy read, to be honest. I mean, it was all common sense. I knew all of this—I just didn’t do any of it. It seemed easy to do. But doing the easy thing is also so hard, because if it’s easy to do, it’s also easy not to do.

Having all the baby steps written out gave me clarity. In the book, Dave has a page where you write out all your debts. As painful as it was, I poured out our mistakes with ink inside his book. When I saw the numbers, my heart sank as if the airplane hit a patch of intense turbulence. Between the house, student loans, my car, furniture, the home-improvement store cards, and our credit cards, we had accumulated more than $140,000 of debt in just eighteen months.

For two people talking about starting a family, we were being as stupid as possible. Somewhere above St. Louis I realized we were doing everything wrong. Elizabeth awoke to a husband who had a different sort of awakening. She laughed when she saw my eyes. At first she thought something was wrong, until she understood I was now in “intense psycho” mode.

“We need to get out of debt,” I urged her. As I whispered louder than she wanted me to, she looked at me as if I were trying to enter a cult. I tried to let her know that this was a good thing, and I wasn’t going off the deep end. We returned home to prepare for our New Year’s bash and the unveiling of “Pugliese’s Tavern”. My parents and brother, along with Elizabeth’s mom, were traveling in for the celebration, along with forty or so friends that would ring in the New Year with us.

We had no money, but the finishing touches for the basement needed to be completed. By the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I had already read The Total Money Makeover twice. I wasn’t able to convince Elizabeth to pay down the debt, but I was able to persuade her to agree to not use credit cards anymore. We needed to start somewhere. My brother Steve joined me on one final Home Depot run for the last few light bulbs and screws we needed to finish the basement. I swiped my credit card and told him that I would never use a credit card again.

We were done. Even though we technically hadn’t done anything, for the first time in a long while it felt like we were going in the right direction. I had a slight sense of peace as we prepared for the party. If we stopped using the cards, we would never be in any more debt than we were at that moment.

The New Year’s Eve party was an enormous success. We partied deep into the night and rang in the New Year, and for us, a new life, with a house filled with friends, family, and love.

January 1st arrived with a hangover and a mission. We weren’t getting out of debt starting this year. We were getting out of debt starting right now. This was not a resolution. This was not a goal. This was a life change. Well, at least as far as I was concerned. Elizabeth still thought I was losing my mind. And she wasn’t the only one.

Becoming Weird

I was talking about our plan with a co-worker when another photographer overheard our conversation. He was in his mid-50’s and listened intently as I laid it out. He snickered like I was an 11-year-old telling him I was going to play professional baseball when I grow up.

He finally cut in when I told him we had just cut up our credit cards. “What? That’s insane,” he lectured me. “How will you pay for things?”

“With cash,” I answered.

He looked at me like I was growing a second head. The idea of paying cash was now such a foreign thought. I understood then that we were going to be the weird ones.

The first goal was to save $1,000 in a “baby emergency fund”. The idea is to have something put away just in case something unexpected comes up as you begin paying down debt. The enthusiasm I spoke with around my co-workers faded when I realized our debt and expenses accounted for all the income we brought in from our jobs. It’s a dreary outlook when the idea of saving $1,000 is a struggle. And even if we could, I was conflicted. Shouldn’t we just start paying down the debt we had and worry about the emergency fund later? And what about our retirement or investing? At thirty-three years old, I had barely saved anything. As much as I loved the idea of the baby steps, it felt overwhelming.

At this point, I had found Ramsey’s radio show on a station in town. The job of a photojournalist means spending more time in the car than it does shooting photographs, so I took advantage of that every afternoon. Listening to caller after caller experiencing almost exactly what we were going through gave Elizabeth and me the first push we n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE: Four Years to Freedom
• PART TWO: The Five Stages of Freelance to Freedom
• Acknowledgments